Ponderosa Promise: A History of U.S. Forest Service Research in Central Oregon

摘要

Research interest in the forests of Oregon and Washington east of the Cascade Range can be traced back to 1897, when Fredrick V. Coville of the Division of Forestry, U.S. Department of Agriculture, reconnoitered the Cascade Range Forest Reserve to report on forest growth and sheep grazing there in an 1898 report. Subsequent forest survey in the late 1890s and early 1900s was stimulated by anticipation of the timber boom that would follow arrival of a railroad. In 1908, Gifford Pinchot's new Forest Service sent young Thornton Taft Munger to study the encroachment of lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta Dougl. ex Loud.) on the more valuable ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa Dougl. ex Laws.) stands. By the end of the year, Munger was in charge of the North Pacific District's one-man Section of Silvics, which evolved to become the Pacific Northwest Forest Experiment Station in 1924 with him at the helm. The forest research effort east of the Cascade Range picked up speed with establishment in 1931 of the Pringle Falls Experimental Forest to research the ecologically and economically viable silvicultural systems that would convert the stagnant old-growth forests into more-productive second-growth forests. During the ensuing six and one-half decades, a small group of Forest Service researchers and their university counterparts working at the experimental forest and, beginning in 1963, the Bend Silviculture Laboratory, pioneered and pursued the practical silvicultural research that both led and responded to the evolution of their science.